Just a short and personal rant here about drug use, specifically hallucinogens. Psychedelics and drugs with hallucinogenic properties which are a form of that.
Alan Watts has warned us many times that psychedelics aren't for everyone and that it would actually be dangerous if the majority of a population began using them. I agree with him. It may not necessarily be physically dangerous to the individual, but definitely dangerous for the culture of that population. Hallucinogens allow the user, among other things, to temporarily step out of the many socially constructed "boxes" culture has enclosed them in. They become decontextualized and behold the whole superstructure from outside of it, often noting the absurdity and "arbitrariness" of our categorizations and sometimes even seeing them as perversions of the Whole. Many of them then go on to take a very anti-cultural, anti-civilizational stance, they stop playing by the rules and stop contributing to the building of their "evil" and "unnatural" civilization. McKenna's quote "Culture is not your friend" comes to mind. It's like post-modernism in a pill, without the depressive nihilism. Is it …show more content…
This is just another form of hedonistic nihilism. And this isn't even mentioning their parasitic selfishness, which is ironic since they would characterize themselves as being for the most part quite selfless, thanks to their ego-shattering experiences induced by psychedelics. They take the fruits from the blood-soaked branches of the tree of culture while refusing to water it with their own blood as their ancestors have for millennia, some even wishing to uproot the whole damn thing. This is all to say that, more likely than not, they were more useful in their ignorant state and as cogs in the greater machine we call civilization. Nietzsche writes as much in Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Alan Watts has warned us many times that psychedelics aren't for everyone and that it would actually be dangerous if the majority of a population began using them. I agree with him. It may not necessarily be physically dangerous to the individual, but definitely dangerous for the culture of that population. Hallucinogens allow the user, among other things, to temporarily step out of the many socially constructed "boxes" culture has enclosed them in. They become decontextualized and behold the whole superstructure from outside of it, often noting the absurdity and "arbitrariness" of our categorizations and sometimes even seeing them as perversions of the Whole. Many of them then go on to take a very anti-cultural, anti-civilizational stance, they stop playing by the rules and stop contributing to the building of their "evil" and "unnatural" civilization. McKenna's quote "Culture is not your friend" comes to mind. It's like post-modernism in a pill, without the depressive nihilism. Is it …show more content…
This is just another form of hedonistic nihilism. And this isn't even mentioning their parasitic selfishness, which is ironic since they would characterize themselves as being for the most part quite selfless, thanks to their ego-shattering experiences induced by psychedelics. They take the fruits from the blood-soaked branches of the tree of culture while refusing to water it with their own blood as their ancestors have for millennia, some even wishing to uproot the whole damn thing. This is all to say that, more likely than not, they were more useful in their ignorant state and as cogs in the greater machine we call civilization. Nietzsche writes as much in Thus Spoke Zarathustra